When PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize (for national reporting) in 2008, the committee touted how they used “probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.” It’s not that simple. It’s not always so cut and dried to locate “truth.”
While USA Today fact-checking boss Eric Litke says fact-checkers should be “obsessed with fairness,” our latest NewsBusters study of PolitiFact demonstrates a significant partisan aggression against Republican politicians. Named politicians in the GOP were tagged as “Mostly False” or worse in almost 75 percent of fact checks, while the Democrats landed on that False side only 26 percent of the time. Blogs tagging the Republicans as false (47) were almost five times as common as blogs tagging the Democrats as false (ten).
PolitiF …